New Solutions to Old Problems

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Responding to MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton’s call to create a network of people committed to “building more just virtual and real worlds,” Chicago homeless advocates are planning to open two new hypothermia shelters in Second Life and move their administrative offices to There.com.

I think it’s about time direct service providers started being more forward-thinking.  They haven’t improved on the meal-and-a-bed paradigm in years.

Comments

[erasmus]

Stuart: Ouch!

[Ghada Beeleve]

Cold!

[Ayem Notreel]

Things are heating up in Second Life!

[Antoine MOil]

A sampling of comment from the usual gang of idiots hiding behind my skirts (and I don't wear a skirt, so you can imagine how comfortable that is.):

• I don't know, fellers. You didn't find it "not unfunny"? Not even a little not unfunny? (And the graphic, she is magnifique, n'est-ce paw?)

• Dude, arrêtes, you are harshing ma bonheur.

• This Stuart is no smalley!

• Trenchant and horrible. A new high/low. Can he be made to jump?

[WCT staff]

Antoine --

We have to agree with Stuart's detractors. Most of us at WCT (Stuart excluded) find the post not "not unfunny." It takes a certain callousness to laugh at human misery, even if it's virtual. Solzhenitsyn once described a young secretary who wore her best dress to work on her birthday. Hours later, she was carted off to the Gulag in a truck with the slogan “Drink Soviet champagne!” painted on its side. Now this really happened, or so we’re led to believe—who knows with these Russians?—although of course it didn’t happen just as we were reading the story, which would have made a moral difference, I think, because then otherwise we might not have been excused for simultaneously laughing at the irony and crying at the terrible outcome for the young girl. Anyway, it was nothing like what we felt reading Stuart’s post. See what I mean?

Please let us know if Stuart's in trouble and with whom. Each of us makes a small weekly contribution to a fund for bail money. We're a bit concerned that satirizing an emerging fad was recently reclassified as an aggravated felony.

[Antoine MOil]

Will do, Staff.

Stuart, by my reckoning, is firmly in the embrace of the party fathers, and while not totally safe, he may certainly still function, on a limited basis, for now.

Counter-intuitive, perhaps, but the fathers' embrace is long, broad, deep and enigmatic.

Apropos de that, I've been reading a little tome while on the commode called (appropriately enough) "On Bullshit".

Not that "this" is bullshit, or "that" is bullshit, no, no. No deprecations are implied whatsoever.

No, it is the second reading of the title that interests me most, as in , "On, Bullshit!", urging Bullshit forward as if it were some fearsome lead reindeer, driven to deliver the never empty sack of nearly empty goods to we townspeople snoring below.

What better response to the fey fatman's cries than to call back boldly en masse "Danger, beware!", urging Danger to tread lightly should it dare descend on our solid community to spread pitiful faux fear.

To summarize:

Hello, Danger? Beware: no bullshit.

A very satisfying movement...

[Stuart Johnson]

No deprecations taken. I myself just had a kind of "movement."